Distributed, parallel web service orchestration using XSLT

Abstract

©2005 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.GridXSLT is an implementation of the XSLT programming language designed for distributed web service orchestration. Based on the functional semantics of the language, it compiles programs into dataflow graphs which can be efficiently executed across a collection of machines in a cluster or grid environment. Calls to web services can be made using the standard function call semantics provided by the language, and occur in parallel using the dataflow model of computation. The programmer is not required to explicitly specify the parallelism, as the details of how programs are scheduled and executed in a distributed environment are abstracted away by the run-time engine. XSLT provides a higher level programming model than many other approaches to web services composition; we explore its use here as a means of easing the task of orchestrating the interactions between services. In addition to the normal XSLT syntax, our system also supports programs written in XSLiTe, an alternative syntax we have developed which uses more concise representations of language constructs, increasing the ease of development, and bringing code readability closer to that of traditional programming languages. Our goal is to ease the construction of applications based on web services composition, such as those used in eScience and other fields in which service oriented architectures are prominent.Peter M. Kelly, Paul D. Coddington, Andrew L. Wendelbor